Darkfall Online Beta Reports

Okay. No need to be skeptical anymore. This is not vapourware. I haven’t played it myself yet (and even if I would have, I wouldn’t write that down here for obvious reasons. 😉 , but I am officially psyched about this game. Fuck. Just read these quotes of beta-testers here. I know you could argue it’s a bit dubious to have the community manager pick the NDA-breaching quotes of testers, but still seems valid enough to me. Seems this game is going to revolutionize the MMO genre. And that of an indepedent unknown game-developer, I guess there’s more than one CCP. Anyway:

Overall Impressions:Overall we’ve been getting very good feedback about the game, we were hard pressed to find anything negative and actually had to dig for it and to ask a few times for something more critical.

The World-Graphics-Technology

The consensus about the graphics is that they’re much better than expected, something we’ve been saying all along. The game has been very stable and smooth overall, even in the full debug mode it’s running in. We’re experiencing really good gameplay from all over the world, even though our beta servers are in Germany, we’ve had no problems reported by testers in Western N. America, or in the Far East.

AI

The AI has been reported very tough, even the newbie AI. When they’re very damaged they flee and are hard to catch up to. We’ve done some tweaking and as the players familiarize themselves with the game more, they seem to be enjoying the experience. Again these are not your run of the mill MMOG AI.

Controls

We started out the beta without any instructions whatsoever. This was done to assess the intuitiveness of the game. Darkfall isn’t like your average MMOG. There is a lot you can do in it and an unprecedented level of control. As such, you have a lot more controls and UI feedback you need to navigate. It has to be said that you can remap everything to your liking, and you can move everything around and set-up transparency on all the GUI elements. While there’s quite a lot of tweaking to be done, we’ve found that after the initial shock, the GUI and controls works well for the players.

It seems that the people having most trouble with the lack of documentation are players of other MMOG games. Those who play FPS games have reported fewer problems with the GUI and controls. However this is the area where we had the most criticism, so we’re looking at ways of improving the understanding for the new player.

PvP – Looting

We’ve been wiping characters very often so it’s still hard for the testers to dive headfirst into PvP. We expect a lot more feedback in the very near future.

Crafting

The testers haven’t been reporting on crafting much yet. I suppose you start delving in it after you check out the basics, so we expect more on this soon.